Money talks

Greg Avery has spent seven years trying to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences. His early, crude opposition to animal experiments twice landed him in jail. But then he took his fight to the City - which is where, he claims, you really get results.
Steve Boggan meets him

It is difficult not to fall back on stereotypes when waiting to meet Britain's most prolific animal rights campaigner. He is bound to arrive, his frame emaciated by a monk-like adherence to veganism, with a scraggy dog on a piece of string. He will stare with disapproval at my leather shoes and probe deftly into my meat-eating tendencies. He might even walk out when asked about his role in the guerrilla campaign that has rattled big business, enraged Tony Blair and almost brought Britain's biggest animal testing laboratory to its knees.

And then Greg Avery walks through the door, slightly chubby in a sensible shirt and fleece, looking like an accountant on dress-down Friday.

Avery, 38, is the mouthpiece and leading light of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (Shac), the group that has waged a seven-year campaign to close down Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS) in Cambridgeshire, a company that uses animals in pharmaceutical research. Since attracting the attention of Avery and friends, HLS has fallen from the London and New York stock exchanges, had loans called in from its bankers (the Bank of England, under pressure from the government, is now the only bank that will hold its account) and watched as shareholders, afraid of being accused of complicity in animal cruelty, have haemorrhaged away.

Along the way, there have been attacks on Huntingdon employees, letter-writing campaigns in which shareholders have been wrongly described as paedophiles, and persistent, psychologically damaging threats against scientists and their families. Avery says none of the nasty stuff has anything to do with Shac, that it's the work of extremists such as the Animal Liberation Front. But isn't that a bit like Sinn Fein saying it has no influence over the IRA?

"No," he replies. "Our phones are tapped, our cars have tracking devices on them, our emails are read. Believe me, if we were involved in anything illegal, the police would be the first to know."

Love them or loathe them, the core of 10 individuals at the heart of Shac have for ever changed the way tiny, single-interest pressure groups will wage war against big business. They were the first to identify the fact that greed and self-interest in the City could be used to turn companies against each other when the troubles of one - targeted by Shac - threatened the bottom line of the other. They like to think of it as capitalism eating itself.

To talk to the man at the centre of the process is sometimes uncomfortable. But to do so is to wander through the mind of the protester of the future. Avery was born near Buxton in Derbyshire into a middle-class family. His father, Phil, was an aero-electrician with British Aerospace, and his mother, Gwen, a tailor. He had five brothers and as a boy was more interested in Manchester United and walking than animal rights - though the family always had a dog.

"I wasn't especially interested in animals when I was a youngster," he says. "But we were always brought up to understand what was going on. My mother and father were both Labour voters and they made us very politically aware - I remember power cuts, my father being on strike, and from an early age I had a very good understanding of the trades union movement.

"When I first got involved in animal rights, the miners' strike was going on and, as a family, we were donating money every week. From quite an early age we were politicised. Then one day I noticed a report in our local paper about hunt saboteurs being out the week before and they had been 'pre-spraying' with water and garlic or Anti-Mate [a product that keeps dogs away from bitches when they are on heat], which put the dogs off the scent of foxes.

"I thought that was something I'd like to get involved in - I was about 15 at the time - and a friend at school had a contact so we went along to a hunt in Cheshire. As it happened, the weather was bad and the hunt was cancelled but there was a demo against an ICI animal research laboratory near Audley Edge, so we went to that instead."

In hunting terms, that was Avery's blooding. Protesters raided the lab and climbed on the roof. He remained an activist for the next 13 years. Then, in 1996, he heard of a campaign against Consort Bio Services kennels in Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, which bred beagles for animal research, and decided to become involved.

"We had no firm and fast ideas over what we would do, but we were determined that we would not simply get bored after a few weeks and go away - we would stay at it until it closed down," he recalls. "At first, we protested outside and issued leaflets and so on, and the staff going in laughed at us. But we were very professional; we were there every day from 6.30am to 6.30pm. After a while, the staff stopped laughing."

There were all-night vigils and large demonstrations which meant the kennels had to spend money on extra security. Costs mounted, staff began to leave after protests outside their homes. Three raids resulted in the "liberation" of 26 dogs. "Ten months later, they closed the kennels and 200 beagles were found new homes," Avery recalls. "There were no big parties. We were more surprised than anything, but it gave us an inkling of what we could achieve."

Almost immediately, in September 1997, Avery and some other diehards moved on to Hillgrove Cat Farm in Witney near Oxford, which bred animals for research. He says it was big business; up to 1,000 cats for sale at any one time, bred to be "specific pathogen-free" animals costing up to £500 each. Eventually, it too closed after unknown elements tied the owner's wife to a tree with a bag over her head. With the help of the RSPCA, Avery says, 800 cats were found homes.

The next target was easy - protesters said they had seen animals being delivered to Huntingdon Life Sciences. So, with tactics honed, the travelling protest show moved to HLS in 1999.

Campaigners had seen a Channel 4 documentary in which a beagle had been punched by staff. It should be pointed out here that HLS has admitted there was "an incident of animal cruelty" but has subsequently insisted it adheres to the highest standards of care, using animals only when necessary. But the protesters were already galvanised. I recall attending one demonstration at HLS in 2000 and asking one of them what he would do if research on their dog could save their dying mother. "My mother would have to die," was the reply.

"We looked at the Huntingdon share price," says Avery. "The company was already in a financial mess - the share price was down to 17p. It was Europe's largest vivisection laboratory, a public company that was bigger than anything else we had taken on. It would be difficult, but we knew our best chance was to hit it financially. We decided on what we called a multi-faceted 3-D campaign, and that is what it has become."

So, were many people involved, and did they move to the area? "No," he replies. "We had lots of people who supported us but there are a hardcore of about 10 activists. HLS is in the middle of nowhere; we could go there and shout at people, but they just don't care. We decided most of the damage could be done from hundreds of miles away if we did our homework. We had to target the shareholders."

And so Avery began studying the financial information provided by companies such as Bloomberg and Reuters. "Reuters provided a service called Citywatch, which offered information on shareholders," he says. "I posed as a potential customer - the service cost £200 a month - and asked what information they could give me. I said I might be interested in investing in Huntingdon Life Sciences and asked for an example of the information they could provide. I was emailed a list of the main HLS shareholders, and we got a big shock.

"Not only were we shown who the nominees were - big investment bankers like Phillips and Drew - but also the beneficiaries, the people they were investing for, usually big pension funds. They included the Labour party pension fund, and those of Camden Council, Hammersmith and Fulham Council, Rolls-Royce and Rover."

Labour quickly ordered its shares to be sold and, following demonstrations outside the homes of the directors of fund managers, HLS shares were dumped on the stock market by Phillips and Drew at just 1p each.

The protesters learned that HLS had been propped up, before their involvement, by a £24.5m loan from NatWest, which had been taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland. They targeted branches of NatWest and RBS in 2000 and, much to the chagrin of the government, RBS refused to renew the loan facility. Stephens Investment Bank, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, picked it up but it, too, withdrew in 2002 following protests by Shac supporters in the US.

The demonstrators continued to learn about the workings of the City. "We have supporters in all walks of life - we've even had copies of stuff from Tony Blair's desk sent by sympathisers - and one of them told us that we could cut out all the shareholders if we targeted what are called market-makers," says Avery. "Without at least one market-maker, you can't get your shares traded on the Stock Exchange.

"We found out who were HLS's market-makers - it had two - and we staged demos outside the homes of directors. They both pulled out, and trading on HLS shares on the London Stock Exchange was suspended. Then we did the same in the US."

There have been other apparent setbacks for HLS - in June 2005 it had to sell its research laboratories, in Alconbury, Cambs, Occold, Suffolk, and New Jersey in the US and then lease them back as tenants. Earlier this month, hundreds of shareholders of the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline, a major customer of HLS, received emails warning them to sell their shares in GSK or suffer the consequences. GSK says it is standing firm and, in an unusual show of City solidarity, was supported in a letter published by seven major stockbrokers. But nerves are frayed.

Avery said his group was not responsible for the latest threats; in 2000 he and his wife, Natasha, were given 12-month jail sentences for conspiring to cause a nuisance after publishing HLS employees' addresses on the internet. He has also been jailed for using threatening words and behaviour during the Shac campaign, but he insists that since the conspiracy charge Shac has not been involved in the recent email campaign or any illegal activity.

"It would be naive to think that the illegal tactics of animal rights extremists are responsible for HLS's problems," he says. "Our legitimate tactics have more of an effect. Companies and banks see that an association with vivisection drives customers away. And I totally condemn any incidents of violence or harassment."

Similarly, he says he unequivocally denounced the violence that led to the closure of Darley Oaks guinea pig farm in Newchurch, Staffordshire, and the theft of the remains of the owner's mother-in-law, Gladys Hammond. He says he found that "creepy". He was, however, spotted at Darley Oaks on a number of occasions during that campaign.

Huntingdon Life Sciences' managing director, Brian Cass, is indignant when Avery professes to condemn violence, pointing out that the protester has been jailed five times for threats of violence in various campaigns.

"The campaign's objectives were to close HLS in one year, then two years, then three years," says Cass. "It has obviously failed. In fact, our business has doubled over that period. In our democratic society the use of intimidation and coercion should not be allowed to influence business decisions.

"Our business is helping our customers develop safe new medicines that have the potential to save lives and improve the quality of life of patients around the world. The use of animals is a small but essential part of that research and it is, quite rightly, strictly controlled in the UK."

Naturally, the two sides will never see eye to eye. Avery says campaigning for animal rights is a life-long mission and he will not stop until the day he dies or until all animal cruelty - including farming for food - comes to a halt. Nevertheless, he says he tries to live a normal life with his wife, Natasha, in a house at an undisclosed location in the south-east of England that also serves as offices and campaign headquarters.

"We live on £50 a week taken from donations to Shac, which is enough for food and second-hand clothes," he says. They have no children but not, as one press report stated recently, because committed animal rights campaigners are in the habit of being sterilised so they can concentrate on the cause. Neither he nor Natasha has been. "It's a full-time job but we do have a life outside all this," he says. "We enjoy climbing in Scotland and going to the cinema and we try to have as normal a life as possible. But there's no time for children."

He is a fierce critic of injunctions limiting campaigners' right to protest (and he is invariably named when there are animal rights demonstration, whether he has anything to do with them or not), particularly the kind that have limited hours of protest and numbers of protesters outside Oxford University's planned animal research laboratory. "John F Kennedy once said, if you make peaceful revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable," he says. A threat, perhaps? It depends on your point of view, as do all aspects of this argument.

We have had two hours of surprisingly candid conversation and now the scourge of the pharmaceutical industry is ready to leave. He knows many people oppose what he stands for, but he says he would rather "educate" them than enter into conflict with them. "Whatever you think of us," he says, "whether you like us and think we're the equivalent of Mary Poppins, or whether you regard us as mad extremists, you have to admit one thing - what we do works".

Five high-profile campaigners for animal rights

Morrissey

"If you agree with vivisection," the singer said last week, "go and be vivisected upon yourself." At his concert at the New Theatre Oxford, he also denounced Oxford University as "the shame of England" for allowing the construction of a new animal research centre. Earlier this year, he told the fanzine True to You that he supported "the efforts of the animal rights militia". He added that he understood "why fur-farmers and so-called laboratory scientists are repaid with violence - it is because they deal in violence themselves and it is the only language they understand". In 1987, as lead singer with the Smiths, he recorded an album called Meat Is Murder.

Pamela Anderson

The former Baywatch star fronted a Peta campaign against the treatment of chickens in Vietnam supplied to Kentucky Fried Chicken. She demanded that the bust of KFC's founder, Colonel Harland Sanders, be removed from the Kentucky state capitol, describing it as "a monument to cruelty".

Jodie Marsh

The model has fought for animal rights in conjunction with Peta , featuring in its "body parts" ad, in which she sits with a butcher's diagram drawn on her skin. She has also fronted the "I'm Not a Nugget" campaign against cruelty to poultry.

"I don't eat any animals," she has said. "I could never eat a dog, and I don't see how a cow, a sheep, a pig or anything else is any different because all animals have a mind and a brain and a ... personality." As for fur: "Everybody knows it's completely wrong to wear fur. They're beautiful living creatures. You certainly wouldn't wear a human-skin jacket."

Paul McCartney

"Sometimes people place too much faith in people in white lab coats and assume that there's a need for animal testing just because it has been going on for so long," the former Beatle said in a recent interview. "I believe this to be a holdover from the dark age of medical science." He, too, is a supporter of Peta, like his estranged wife, Heather Mills.

Brigitte Bardot

In 1986, the actor gave £300,000 to set up the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals. She has taken on the French meat industry, demanding less cruel methods of slaughter, as well as the fashion and cosmetic industries.

"I have spent my entire life trying to make people respect all animal life," she has said. "The human race makes me feel so upset. It is money that rules this world and leads to the worst possible atrocities."